Using browsers for this sort of thing is a bad idea. These sites are the easiest (and most important) to target by copyright holders. Sophisticated users use Kodi plugins, torrents over VPN, or private share servers / services. These users are nearly impossible to stop. Keeping easily accessible websites offline and off search engines is how you stop Joe Shmoe from piracy, plus there's a centralized single point of failure to take down.
The plugin will usually have triple redundant update mechanisms, so when the server is taken down or the domain siezed it can be put back up in a few hours, with the user not even noticing.
This is mentioned in the first paragraph of the article:
> Its original developers took the service down and abandoned the project merely a few days after it launched in 2014. But since the project was open source, other developers were able pick up where they left off, and it's been killed and revived a few more times ever since.
There is a big market of folks that install custom firmware on cheap Chinese media players/sticks - they charge a monthly fee (less than Netflix) and stream the pirated content from their own servers.
Another reason is that some media simply doesn't exist on Netflix or any other streaming platform in your country so you have no legal way to access it.
The ones I've seen here don't feature a monthly fee.
I'd also like to extend your point 4 (or perhaps add a point 5), that some of these people aren't even aware they're pirating content or that they're breaking a law somewhere.
You pay around 5 dollars to get access to a US Netflix account per month. Credit Card infra is still bad here, and the local Netflix is not worth it even when you can pay. Also, no Access to the others.
First of all, I'm not a user of this content since I mostly don't care about my own country media (southern Europe) or platforms like Netflix.
But I know quite a few that use this kind of devices to get cheaper access to football matches, series and general paid television content. When the supplied configuration fails they just change to another dealer. For them it's cheaper to pay 50€ for the device and a few euros every 2-3 months than paying over 120€ a month for the full package (football matches access is only available at that price range).
When services are cheap most people that want them just pay since they're convenient.
Would you mind posting some links to these devices? Just curious about the "custom" firmware and media player UX itself. Do they come with a remote control too?
Search for HDMI stick pc devices on eBay and you’ll find them. Anything compatible with Kodi will probably turn up the grey market Amazon Fire et al clones you and OP refer to.
I am not sure about Popcorn Time, but these days you can find plenty of watchable results by searching for "<movie name> watch online" in search engines from countries that don't care about copyright (notably Russia).
It appears that they use the same setup - put terabytes of encrypted video files on platforms that offer some kind of free storage (hello, Github) and have a simple website hosted in a piracy-friendly country that loads these files, decrypts them on-the-fly and plays the video. If you open such a site without an adblocker, you may find some truly ingenious monetization "schemes". Like opening a target site in a background window, scrolling it programmatically and clicking on ads in a "natural" way, while the user is busy watching.
The funniest part though is that the market for it only exists due to the greed and stupidity of the legal "platforms". Many people would happily buy (as in pay once, play forever) films and TV shows, many others would find it reasonable to pay $20-50/month for a single streaming service covering 90% of the things you would want to watch. But having relevant movies splintered over a multitude of competing platforms with a combined rent approaching what you could pay for a small apartment is a complete non-starter. So, people are back to piracy.
>If you open such a site without an adblocker, you may find some truly ingenious monetization "schemes". Like opening a target site in a background window, scrolling it programmatically and clicking on ads in a "natural" way, while the user is busy watching.
does that actually work? what you're describing shouldn't work due to same-origin.
If the target site is controlled by the same party, it could easily include logic for loading the auto-scrolling script when opened from the player, and pretending to be a regular site otherwise.
It should be like that, but ad platforms are engaging not just in a cat-and-mouse game of ad blockers but also ad impression fraud (their words, not mine). This is why the JS loaded from ad servers are huge - they're trying to detect if it's an actual user or scripted click, which ironically pushes users to block ads wholesale due to these heavy and genuinely CPU-eating JS blobs.
I’ve seen a few venues where it’s possible to digitally buy DRM‐free movies, as a straight up downloadable 1080p MP4. Unfortunately the selection is very limited, to pretty much just a handful of indie documentaries and short films.
I know of three sources: VHX, Vimeo On Demand, and GOG. Although upon looking it appears VHX is now owned by Vimeo, so there are really only two.
> the market for it only exists due to the greed and stupidity of the legal "platforms".
From my experience as a 30-something guy in South/West EU, the "market" for the sites you mention is mostly made of high school/university students who are unwilling or unable to put any money into home entertainment content.
> many others would find it reasonable to pay $20-50/month for a single streaming service covering 90% of the things you would want to watch
But in the EU, $20-50/month get you 2-4 (if not 5) subscriptions from the main content providers. At that point, you are either at that 90% or pretty close.
I agree that having multiple services is subpar, but so is looking for movies on the sites you mention (especially without a good adblocker).
And I am pretty sure that we will just end up either reinventing cable (ugh), or having smart TVs that subscribe/unsubscribe you from streaming services based on your watch list to keep your monthly expenses at a minimum.
> The funniest part though is that the market for it only exists due to the greed and stupidity of the legal "platforms". Many people would happily buy (as in pay once, play forever) films and TV shows, many others would find it reasonable to pay $20-50/month for a single streaming service covering 90% of the things you would want to watch.
I think a lot of people miss this. A lot of pirating declined when Netflix became popular. Then there were a ton of platforms and pirating came back. But I feel pirating is different now. It's because there's one compelling show on the small platforms and so those get pirated. A certain amount of centralization is good but too much makes it difficult.
I think natural monopolies are pretty common wherever there is a network effect. Depending on what you mean by effective, I'd say that Facebook has an effective monopoly. We could say oil or web hosting has a centralized oligopoly. I should refine my first comment by stating that there is a trend to centralization with markets that depend on network effects. This is simply because power in these markets isn't linear with respect to the number of users, but rather super-linear. Momentum is a key aspect.
I jumped into the Netflix bandwagon and stopped using torrents few years back. Then I realized that Netflix has almost no content at all, and primarily interested in pushing "their content" onto the masses. Now I am back to torrents. One big difference is now it is harder to find torrents - earlier, it was easy to find one say for a Uruguayan movie from 2004; they are becoming quite rare now.
I think during the period in which you switched to Netflix, the remaining community moved to private trackers. If you are still looking for public trackers it will seem the community has died. The truth is probably the opposite, because since everyone moved to private, niche Uruguayan movies from 2004 have become much easier to find in much better quality.
I live in Hungary. Disney+ hasn't launched here, which means you cannot watch stuff like the new Star Wars shows legally, you can only pirate them. (Yeah, I know VPN exists.) My point is it seems Disney has decided this market is too small for them to lift a finger. There are other movies that you simply cannot watch on any platform legally.
Netflix each year raises prices but the actual offer (ignoring Netflix Originals) is shrinking (at least in my smaller European market). I just reduced from the UHD to just HD subscription and am back to the price of 2-3 years ago. I end up just watching less, if not for the kids it would long be canceled. Disney is an evil corp that I can't support while keeping my soul. On the plus side: one more reason not to watch.
I used to binge classic scifi and documentaries on Netflix, and then one day it seemed like both parts of the catalogue were reduced to a small fraction of what they were.
I'll unsub once my kids grow tired of their (mostly awful) cartoons.
> many others would find it reasonable to pay $20-50/month for a single streaming service covering 90% of the things you would want to watch.
I just use prime and rent movies that aren't free on it. It covers well over 90% of what I want to watch, and I spend well under $50/mo on it. After the $10 subscription, $40/mo for the rentals is like 2-3 seasons of a show, or 10+ movies (in addition to the included stuff). Legal cheap solutions exist, you just have to be willing to rent movies and shows like in the blockbuster days.
Yup. I'm also back to piracy, which is ridicolous really as a grown man. But should I pay for 5 different streaming services, where I basically borrow movies for whatever time they decide? I can't even remember which service has which movie so its very hard to just start watching something.
I wouldn't call that greed and stupidity of the legal platforms. Netflix would probably have every piece of content on their site if owners would license it to them at a reasonable fee.
I thought Popcorn Time was just a Bittorrent client, which searched the YTS torrent database, and prioritised blocks sequentially so you can stream the media file as you torrent it? It would be more accurate to say the project shut its website down.
Good time to grab all the git repos I guess... I've been planning to fork this to create a cheap, secure distribution system for users who own media through my service ever since it came out.
The idea was that I'd control the list of peers that it could connect to, and all the peers would be verified, authorized, owners of the media being shared.
The whole goal is to create a wide spread distribution system without having to pay a cloud provider, and to make the service as cheap as possible for the users.
Why would you need Web3 to do that? You can just make a regular site that has a pay wall or a site like Gumroad where you can pay what you want for products, media, etc.
Corollarious question, why would a pirate pay on your site when they can just...pirate it for free elsewhere? Seems like the value proposition for your site for pirates is worse than current piracy.
After discovering rarbg and Blu-ray quality rips, I never went back to popcorn time. Hosting a plex server on a Rpi with 2 4TB external HDD’s was one of the best things I’ve done.
Considering how HN is so fond of NFTs, here is a good use of Nfts, sell them as 'virtual tickets' that make it legal to watch a movie wherever the hell you want. People used to have DVD and CD racks to show off, i m sure they'd like a virtual one.
PopcornTime was hugely popular here a couple of years ago but now Stremio just put up a better product that did the same, and I hadn't heard of Popcorn in a while; I guess that's probably a big part of the reason.
Yeah but what about Popcorn-time.nl or The-Popcorntime.com?
IIRC there were at least a couple of these floating around, it was probably too much of a headache to figure out which were legitimate and which were malware.
64 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadI understand torrents (they are distributed) but do the plugins also use distributed content sources?
> Its original developers took the service down and abandoned the project merely a few days after it launched in 2014. But since the project was open source, other developers were able pick up where they left off, and it's been killed and revived a few more times ever since.
After spending $50 on the hardware, you're lucky to get 2 months service. For that price, you might as well just buy Netflix.
1. lack access to credit cards or internet-purchase enabled debit cards (or banking altogether). they can purchase those devices with cash;
2. simply don't understand how it works or that it may stop working in the future;
3. can justify spending money on a physical device, but cannot justify spending money on digital goods or services (according to their value systems)
4. they either ignore, or are fine with, the fact that they are paying for pirated content, which IMHO is the worst form of piracy.
Also, point 3. does not hold up if they pay a monthly fee on top of the cost of the physical device.
I'd also like to extend your point 4 (or perhaps add a point 5), that some of these people aren't even aware they're pirating content or that they're breaking a law somewhere.
You pay around 5 dollars to get access to a US Netflix account per month. Credit Card infra is still bad here, and the local Netflix is not worth it even when you can pay. Also, no Access to the others.
But I know quite a few that use this kind of devices to get cheaper access to football matches, series and general paid television content. When the supplied configuration fails they just change to another dealer. For them it's cheaper to pay 50€ for the device and a few euros every 2-3 months than paying over 120€ a month for the full package (football matches access is only available at that price range).
When services are cheap most people that want them just pay since they're convenient.
It appears that they use the same setup - put terabytes of encrypted video files on platforms that offer some kind of free storage (hello, Github) and have a simple website hosted in a piracy-friendly country that loads these files, decrypts them on-the-fly and plays the video. If you open such a site without an adblocker, you may find some truly ingenious monetization "schemes". Like opening a target site in a background window, scrolling it programmatically and clicking on ads in a "natural" way, while the user is busy watching.
The funniest part though is that the market for it only exists due to the greed and stupidity of the legal "platforms". Many people would happily buy (as in pay once, play forever) films and TV shows, many others would find it reasonable to pay $20-50/month for a single streaming service covering 90% of the things you would want to watch. But having relevant movies splintered over a multitude of competing platforms with a combined rent approaching what you could pay for a small apartment is a complete non-starter. So, people are back to piracy.
does that actually work? what you're describing shouldn't work due to same-origin.
You can do this, physically or digitally.
Digitally, the "forever" part doesn't actually work that great in practice [1]. Unless you can download the movie and store or yourself.
[1] https://www.slashfilm.com/560987/you-still-own-movies-on-app...
I know of three sources: VHX, Vimeo On Demand, and GOG. Although upon looking it appears VHX is now owned by Vimeo, so there are really only two.
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/
https://www.gog.com/movies
From my experience as a 30-something guy in South/West EU, the "market" for the sites you mention is mostly made of high school/university students who are unwilling or unable to put any money into home entertainment content.
> many others would find it reasonable to pay $20-50/month for a single streaming service covering 90% of the things you would want to watch
But in the EU, $20-50/month get you 2-4 (if not 5) subscriptions from the main content providers. At that point, you are either at that 90% or pretty close. I agree that having multiple services is subpar, but so is looking for movies on the sites you mention (especially without a good adblocker).
And I am pretty sure that we will just end up either reinventing cable (ugh), or having smart TVs that subscribe/unsubscribe you from streaming services based on your watch list to keep your monthly expenses at a minimum.
> Viewers in Germany have access to 43.1% of the films available online in the EU, while in Slovenia, for example, only 0.3% are available.
From recently published https://www.fuen.org/en/article/Borderless-Media-Consumption...
I think a lot of people miss this. A lot of pirating declined when Netflix became popular. Then there were a ton of platforms and pirating came back. But I feel pirating is different now. It's because there's one compelling show on the small platforms and so those get pirated. A certain amount of centralization is good but too much makes it difficult.
The Medelin drug cartel story. I wonder what monopolistic entities are working effectively yet we don't realize it.
I'll unsub once my kids grow tired of their (mostly awful) cartoons.
I just use prime and rent movies that aren't free on it. It covers well over 90% of what I want to watch, and I spend well under $50/mo on it. After the $10 subscription, $40/mo for the rentals is like 2-3 seasons of a show, or 10+ movies (in addition to the included stuff). Legal cheap solutions exist, you just have to be willing to rent movies and shows like in the blockbuster days.
The idea was that I'd control the list of peers that it could connect to, and all the peers would be verified, authorized, owners of the media being shared.
The whole goal is to create a wide spread distribution system without having to pay a cloud provider, and to make the service as cheap as possible for the users.
Corollarious question, why would a pirate pay on your site when they can just...pirate it for free elsewhere? Seems like the value proposition for your site for pirates is worse than current piracy.
IIRC there were at least a couple of these floating around, it was probably too much of a headache to figure out which were legitimate and which were malware.